amateur cartography. (nel + murdoch)

[Nel Sayo]

20th Spring, 510 A.V.


Nel let Murdoch sleep through the day, and into the night.

He would come awake to a lowly lit room, candlelight tossing shadows across the walls to cloy in corners, the fire crackling lowly as though it had not lately been stirred. Her traveling bag was tucked beneath the table, still packed, but her boots were set side-by-side next to it. The rapier was lain carefully atop it, its blade shimmering brightly when firelight licked across its edge.

Nel was sitting on the bed, by his feet, her back against the wall, legs slung out across the mattress, ankles crossed. At least three different maps of the continent were piled in her lap, circles and arrows and little notations littering their faces. Her fingertips were smudged black with charcoal. She'd fallen asleep where she sat, her chin lulling forward towards her collarbone, the long, pale, slither of her hair a curtain of seashells and braids that obscured her face.

She'd spent the day trying to figure out where she wanted to go, and how to get there. Down to the docks, where she'd determined which ships were going where, and then she'd gotten herself the maps to try and determine where everything was, which places she'd already been to. It was a big continent, there were bound to be people somewhere that would help her figure out what to do next, that wouldn't seem pained just by the idea of trusting her. She didn't want to stay, not if it meant destroying both of them. Maybe she'd try to find out who her real family was, who they'd been before they'd been slaves. Those memories were so distant, and so ghostly, trying to summon up what little she remembered proved nigh impossible.

So eventually she'd exhausted herself over the maps, but she'd been afraid to crawl into the bed beside him. Sleep took her where she sat, then, because sleep wasn't overly concerned with her fears, or her dreams.

[Murdoch]

Murdoch awoke and for once wasn't groggy and grumpy. Everything ached, though, as if he'd spent the previous evening in some epic brawl. But he'd slept long enough and deeply enough that he actually felt better upon waking up. Which was unusual in itself.

He shoved himself up into a sitting position, eyes sticking to Nel where she slept so soundly. A sigh finally escaped through his nose, and there, with no one to see him, some fierce moment of sadness crossed his face and was gone again by the next heartbeat.

He nudged Nel's hip with one foot, gently lest she try to cut it off, then shifted around on the bed so he could lean against the wall as well, peering down at her roughly sketched maps. "Where the hell did you get those?" he murmured.

[Nel Sayo]

"Hm?"

She came awake with a blink and jolt, head snapping up. The clatter of beads and shells across her shoulders, and she dug a knuckle into her eye, shifting. Ankles uncrossed, an uncomfortable stretch, until she just slumped back against the wall beside him again.

"Oh," she half-yawned, gathering up the maps. "I had them."

A squint of blue eyes up across her shoulder to him.

"You're awake. There's tea. I--" Another yawn. "-- the water should still be warm. I was just trying to figure out where to go, and where I've gone already."

[Murdoch]

He shrugged at the mention of tea, unwilling to get up just yet; he was a little distracted by the maps, peering down at them and trying to figure out what exactly they meant. He'd had one, a long time ago, even more crudely drawn and likely no representation of anything real, just a series of lines to indicate which roads would take him to Syliras.

After a few moments he squinted, and pointed at the dot that marked where Stormhold Castle lay. "Here," he murmured, "this is us. Don't go here," he said, following his finger east until it hit the town of Sunberth, "or here," he said again, tracing it north along the coastline to the dreaded slaver city of Ravok. "But here, now, that's where you should go. The faster the better, probably," he chuckled, fingertip lightly brushing the island of Konti, where it lay just off the coast between those two choatic cities.

[Nel Sayo]

"What's that?" she asked, watching his fingertip wander over the lines she'd drawn.

Over the lines Syon had drawn, over the lines Rezar had drawn even before that. Not a half-bad navigator, a lot of the little marks and notes were in Nel's hand, comprehensible only really to her, divined by the stars over time and time again.

The longer he stayed as he was, the more comfortable she got, until her shoulder sank companionably against his, quite without her realizing. She tucked a twisting curl of pale hair behind her ear, and nodded.

"No, I don't wanna go to Ravok," she laughed quietly, crinkling her nose. "We'd put to port there a few times, and Rezar made me stay below. But I know about it. I thought maybe back to Zeltiva, but that's a lot of land and I'm no good on foot. Or...maybe I'll just get on a ship and...go."

She shrugged; there were worse things, for her, than simply to be a-sea. Plenty of coastline to follow, plenty more nothing beyond that.

[Murdoch]

"That's Sunberth," he said softly, something dead in his voice as he spoke that word. "You'd have more chance of surviving Ravok."

He didn't seem to notice that she was relaxing simply because he wasn't the sort of person to care whether she slouched against him or not, so there was no awkwardness on his part when they resumed some level of their previous camaraderie.

"But Mura, now, that's where you should go." Knew it by reputation only, the island to the north, just east of Ravok, home to the Konti seers. "You need to figure out what the hell you are, Nel. It's too dangerous to just keep drifting through life trusting to luck to keep you safe."

He slid off the bed then, climbing to his feet and making his way over to where the tea steeped, surely too-strong after all this time but he'd still drink it, and did.

[Nel Sayo]

"I know what I am," she muttered, indignant.

As he climbed off the bed, she gathered the maps together and folded them, stumbling herself to her feet and padding over to her pack so that she could tuck them neatly back into one of its pockets.

"Just because I don't look like you, or because I look like some other stupid race with stupid abilities and a stupid island, that doesn't mean I'm not exactly who I am. I don't trust luck either, Doc, 'cause I have fucking bad luck and I always have. There's nothin' there for me except a bunch'a women who look like me but aren't anything like me."

She firmly believed that. If the Konti were some all-seeing race of seers, then why did people like her end up shoved into slave pens? Why didn't they see that shit coming and put a petching stop to it? Her expression darkened a little, but she just shrugged again and went back over to the bed, flopping down on it. Turned her attention to the ceiling.

"Maybe I'll go to the jungle and tame a lion or something."

[Murdoch]

"You know who you are," he sighed, blowing on his tea a moment before taking a gulp, "but you don't know what you are. And it almost got you killed last night, or worse."

He glanced over at her a moment, the took another gulp of tea. "You're a good kid, Nel. You wanna hate them because they didn't foresee all the shitty things that happened in your life, hell, I can understand that. But whatever's inside of them is inside of you, and... fuck it," he grumbled finally, setting his cup on top of the mantle and going over to the bucket to splash cooled water over his face. "Do what you want. Not like you won't anyway," he snorted.

[Nel Sayo]

"You almost got me killed last night," she said, to the ceiling.

He couldn't see her roll her eyes, but he could probably hear the gesture in her voice. Pale eyebrows drew down into a scowl at his cracked, pock-marked plaster roof, but she didn't lift her head to intensify the argument with him. He did sound like Sy, which just made her even more annoyed.

"And I'm like just as old as you are," she added, on a mutter. It was true enough, technically speaking; she trusted him not to know enough about Konti and how they may or may not have aged. She'd still been playing with dolls at 16, much to Syon's enduring confusion. Eventually, she propped herself up on her elbows and did look at him.

"Look, I understand what you're saying, but I dunno what I'd say to anyone when I got there. Hi, we look alike, please tell me why I have scales and some weird tattoo on my wrist and what is the meaning of life, while you're at it? That's stupid. And what if they don't want me anyway? What if I'm -- broken? I know you think I can't survive on my own, but either I'm gonna or I'm gonna end up dead, and you know what? I'd rather not worry about it. Shit happens. I refuse to spend my whole life being afraid and hiding and not trusting anyone, I'd rather be happy for however long I've got. So."

She shrugged, and collapsed onto her back again.

"Maybe I'll go to Mura. And then to the jungle and get the lion."

Which was her way of saying that his opinions were welcomed, and even sought-after, but that she'd have to decide for herself in the end, no matter what.

[Murdoch]

"No, I almost killed you. Your inability to control your petching psychic whatever-you-call-it is the reason why." He grabbed the towel and started drying himself off, then hung it on the back of the chair and went to grab his shirt off the mantle. "You go through life ripping the doors off people's most private, screwed up moments in their entire lives, and one of 'em is gonna stick a knife in your guts for it. And the fact that you just called that," he said, pointing at her wrist, "a 'weird tattoo' proves just how little you know about what's going on."

He'd seen such marks before, though not like that. The ones he'd seen were the marks of Nikali, given to some of the more faithful whores at the Golden Dragon. He wasn't sure what Nel's gnosis meant, only that it came with some level of divine power. And he'd seen enough evidence of that in Nel the night before.

"Knowledge is power, just as much as swinging a sword or reading a map. But if you wanna keep running from this, be prepared to pay the price for that ignorance. That's all I'm saying."

He pulled the last stale bit of bread off the shelf and collapsed into his chair while he ate it, shrugging a little as he chewed. "And you go to the jungle, the Myrians will roast you on a spit. Or sacrifice you to their goddess. Nothing like having your heart carved out of your chest while you watch, hmm?"